Interpretations of Culture in the New Millennium. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xv, 186 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-252-08140-8.
In late January 2017, just as the whole Chinese nation was set to celebrate the Spring Festival, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council of the PRC jointly issued a set of guidelines on preserving and developing “excellent traditional culture,” with major achievements to be registered in traditional culture-related research, education, protection, inheritance, innovation, and exchange by the year 2025. While nothing new, this document culminates the post-Mao late socialist Chinese state’s renewed emphasis on promoting Chinese traditional culture as it strives to consolidate a Chinese national identity at home and boost China’s soft power abroad.
But how does this statist agenda hit the ground, especially in a region such as today’s Yan’an in northern Shanxi province, the heartland of Yellow River agrarian civilization and the cradle of the CCP’s communist revolution, where Maoist revolutionary culture had once prevailed over traditional or folk culture, part of which was rejected as feudal, superstitious, and backward? What are the relationships between Beijing-based urban intellectuals and national culture promoters on the one hand, and local government officials, local intellectuals, and above all, indigenous artisans and ordinary peasants in this process of tradition, cultural protection, and promotion? Furthermore, what is traditional Chinese culture anyway and who is to define it, protect it, and benefit from it? How do multiple actors, various political, economic, and social forces, and initiatives of different scales and purposes interact, intermingle, and interpenetrate each other in the processes of traditional culture making? These questions and many more have never been so important and pertinent in today’s China studies, especially Chinese cultural studies, and anybody who is interested in these questions would want to read Ka-Ming Wu’s brilliant, insightful, engaging, and extremely timely book, Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism, a volume in the University of Illinois Press series “Interpretations of Culture in the New Millennium.”
Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation and drawing upon extensive ethnographic work in Yan’an, including a twelve-month residency and follow-up visits spanning from 2003 to 2012, the book embodies Chinese cultural studies at its best. It is historically informed and sociologically well contextualized, while fully and richly ethnographical. Its analysis and arguments are of general relevance to anybody who is interested in transformations in Chinese folk culture, state-society, and urban-rural relationships. At the same time, the book is also highly specific both in the spatial and temporal senses: the lurid and engrossing tales it tells are uniquely Yan’an and specifically pertinent to the state of rural folk culture in the first decade of twenty-first-century “late socialist” China. Consisting of a weighty introduction, five main chapters, and an extremely short conclusion of merely one-and-a-half pages, the book centres on three folk cultural forms, their practitioners, promoters, sponsors, and, above all, their socio-historically embedded transformation in rural and increasingly urbanizing settings in the Yan’an region: paper-cutting (chapters 1 and 2), folk story-telling (chapters 3 and 4), and spirit cults (chapter 5).
While managing to tell complex, nuanced, vivid, fascinating, and highly personalized tales of heritage making, identity formation, and cultural transformation, the book did a superb job in locating its analysis and interpretations against the drawback of a wide range of historical, empirical, and theoretical literature in China studies and anthropological studies. This, along with its references to Chinese-language sources, makes it an extremely rich and insightful text, as well as an invaluable scholarly guide to students of Chinese cultural politics. The author is particularly skillful in making informative uses of relevant theoretical concepts. Examples include describing the constitution of folk-culture as a “public agrarian sphere” and characterizing villagers engaging in folk culture making as “reflective performers of modernity.” Along the way, she also makes her own original conceptual contributions to the vocabulary of interpreting folk culture in late socialist China. For example, inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality,” the notion of “hyper-folk” is posited as “a mechanism of representation and experience making that replaces and resignifies rural reality” or “rurality without origins” (20); whereas the phrase “surrogate rural subjectivity” is deployed to “highlight the subject of rural villagers as an unstable category in today’s Yan’an, when many migrate to work in cities, live in an urban environment, lose their farmlands, and engage in non-agricultural careers” (141). In this regard, Ann Anagnost, one of the book’s back cover endorsers, certainly has it right when she says that the book offers “[a] wonderful balance of ethnography and theoretical argument.”
The most important point, however, is that the author manages to offer an insightful and engaging interpretation of rural folk-culture making as an ongoing process of contestation, or in her own words, of heritage making in China as a critical process of “narrative battle” among various social forces. Along the way, the author challenges any simplistic and dichotomous state versus society assumptions of a hegemonic party-state and subjugated people, an authentic and essentialized realm of the folk (minjian), and a manufactured and contaminated field of late socialist culture. Instead, as the author adeptly puts it, the book “attends to subtle ways the party-state socialist legacy, capitalistic practices, and traditional cultural practices dance together” (xii). There is no question that she has accomplished her aim in splendid form.
As with any successful ethnographer, the author is highly self-reflective and not shy of describing in great detail her methodology, her variegated roles, and many unexpected, even awkward, encounters in the field. Her nuanced treatment of the Maoist cultural tradition, her attention to the agency and subjectivity of peasants who take up the opportunity of folk-culture revival projects initiated by outside sources to explore, learn, and understand their own everyday practices in a new light, as well as her strong and consistent gender perspective, all contribute to make this book an outstanding and invaluable contribution to contemporary Chinese culture studies. The insights and arguments about the complex processes of contestation over traditional Chinese culture offered by this book become all the more relevant and important in the aftermath of the CCP’s newly released guidelines and the intensified narrative battles that these guidelines will no doubt engender in the coming decades.
One last point of appreciation and caution: with a brilliant cover featuring a paper-cutting image of a soaring red phoenix over a striking scene of a vibrant waist drum performance by Ansai peasants on the yellow earth, and numerous well-chosen folk cultural illustrations and ethnographic photos, this book is aesthetically well designed and a pleasure not only to read, but also to look at. However, the reader is advised to handle the book with care, perhaps in the same way of handling a paper-cutting product: the binding is rather poor. In my case, the first fourteen pages of the book had already fallen off before I finished reading the introduction!
Yuezhi Zhao
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
pp. 798-800